Love story: A blessed spirit who lives on through Johnny’s Jog

By M.A.C. Lynch

|Hartford Courant|

Mar 17, 2019 | 6:00 AM

The Moran family organizes Johnny's Jog every year. Here are members of the Moran family in a photo taken before Johnny's passing. Left to right: Laura, Johnny, Molly, Patrick on Dan's Lap, Dan, Katie and Tommy Moran. (HANDOUT)

Four years into their marriage, Laura and Dan Moran’s life together was turbo-charged with the birth of their first child. “Johnny was born medically fragile, extremely fragile,” Laura says. He had seizures, he was non-verbal and wheelchair bound as he grew. Sometimes he stopped breathing. But, he brought with him a “blessed spirit. . . Johnny was a gift.”

Through Johhny, “We have seen humanity at is finest,” Dan Moran says. “People have been unbelievably kind and generous to us,” though, he notes, neither Laura nor Dan is from Connecticut.

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“We have an amazing support group of people who have been in the trenches with us,” Laura says. They showed up at their door when they saw an ambulance pull up, stepped in to take care of their younger children so she could go with Johnny to the emergency room. That support group for the Morans and similar families in need will be celebrated March 24 in Johnny’s Jog for Charity 5K at Blue Back Square in West Hartford.

Laura and Dan had faced adversity when they were young. “My Mom passed away when I was little,” Laura says, but she and her older brother, sister and father supported each other through their loss. Dan’s family grew closer as his second oldest brother Matt died of brain cancer when Dan was a student at Providence College. Laura and Dan rallied for each other and their son, who was not diagnosed until his ninth birthday with Wieacker-Wolff syndrome, an extremely rare condition manifest in joint deformities, muscle degeneration and impairment of muscles of the eyes, face and tongue. Johnny had such trouble eating, he had a feeding tube. By the time he was seven he was moved onto intravenous nutrition.

Johnny Moran. (Provided by Laura Moran)

Grateful for the help they received, Laura and Dan and their close friends Kelly and Dan Clark started Johnny’s Jog while he was a preschooler to raise money for three local charities that directly help families and children. Next Sunday they will host the ninth running of the neighborhood run and walk in West Hartford, which started with 200 participants and anticipates 1,000 this year. “Our families come in from all over the country” to help in whatever way needed, Laura says. “They all come. They make it work to get here.”

It helps our kids, too,” who initially participated in Johnny’s Jog in strollers. This year the oldest three will run. “We are very open about him. . . It makes them more comfortable to think about him in a positive way. They also recognize how difficult life was for him. It’s been very helpful to keep it open,” Dan says

Having their four children has also helped Laura and Dan move forward. Dan coaches their oldest son Tommy’s lacrosse and football teams, and their daughter Molly’s basketball team. Laura started coaching their younger daughter Katie’s soccer team last year, and she has been working on race logistics for the last two months often until midnight. Laura and Dan also run; Laura has done the half marathon in Hartford and Dan has raced in the New York and Marine Corps marathons.

Family time is spent cheering at each other’s sports events, and at the Connecticut shore for a week in the summer. Laura and Dan both grew up by the water, Laura in Island Heights by the New Jersey shore, and Dan on the Finger Lakes in Skaneateles, New York. “We have good places to visit the grandparents,” which they do every summer, Laura says. Johnny’s February birthday is close to President’s Day, enabling the family to commemorate it by taking a day or weekend away together.

Laura and Dan met the first weekend of their freshman year at Providence College in Rhode Island. Monday they were in the same English class with 10 students. Leaving class, Dan asked Laura if he could walk her to her dorm. Laura thought it was a little soon to get too interested in any guy. “We had just gotten to college,” but by the end of their first semester they started dating regularly. They stayed together all four years, during which Dan played on the college’s lacrosse team.

On graduating, Laura worked for PriceWaterhouse Coopers in New Jersey, and Dan moved to Boston to work in medical sales. “After a year, I moved to Boston,” for a similar position with Fidelity, Laura says. Soon after, Dan left to work in Connecticut.

“I got into business with my brother. He’s nine years older and started his business with two others” in medical sales, Dan says.

While they were in college, Dan had described a grotto, where his family had taken his brother, praying for a cure. “I’d been there so many times,” and Laura had wanted to see it, Dan says. On Dec. 22, 2001, he took her to the grotto at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass., and proposed. “It’s a beautiful, little shrine,” that was special to Dan’s family, and he and Laura hiked with their children to the candlelit grotto after Johnny passed away.

Laura and Dan were married on May 31, 2003, on the New Jersey shore, by which point Laura had switched jobs to pharmaceutical sales at Forest Laboratories in Connecticut. The following year, they bought a home in West Hartford, and seven years ago, with their family expanding, they moved to a bigger house in the same neighborhood.

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Dan is now Eastern Regional Sales Director, and with his brother, he is one of the 11 owners of MTMC, which has expanded from New England across the country. “I have such respect for the work he puts into his job,” especially his ability to balance growing the business with family life, Laura says. “He has a huge heart.”

“We both have very similar backgrounds and values,” Dan says. “I admire the way she managed all the care for Johnny. I admire everything she does. . . We love our time with our kids, and spending time together. We have fun together.”

Johnny’s Jog reflects their optimistic outlook and features music, Irish step dancers, leprechauns, face painting and prizes for the best Irish garb. Participants are invited to run, walk, push strollers or “BE FESTIVE,” as their website says.

Friends and volunteers from their neighborhood, the charities receiving donations, the Rotary Club, West Hartford Exchange Club, and many more will be donating their time, labor, and cheer in celebration of “the electric spirit of Johnny” and children like him. “I feel like that is shared through the event. It is such a positive outcome,” bringing out the best of humanity Laura says.